Various - Famous Stories Every Child Should Know

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The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the
plodding porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he kept
sinking and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their steps.

Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time he
lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the
brass-work above, and felt by their movements beneath him that they
were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great many different
voices, but he could not understand what was being said. He felt that
his bearers paused some time, then moved on and on again. Their feet
went so softly he thought they must be moving on carpet, and as he
felt a warm air come to him he concluded that he was in some heated
chambers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could put two and two
together, though he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty stomach
felt so strangely. They must have gone, he thought, through some very
great number of rooms, for they walked so long on and on, on and on.
At last the stove was set down again, and, happily for him, set so
that his feet were downward.

What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he had
seen in the city of Innspruck.

The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go away,
far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out,
but he peeped through the brass-work, and all he could see was a big
carved lion's head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a
velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair, only the ivory lion.

There was a delicious fragrance in the air--a fragrance as flowers.
"Only how can it be flowers?" thought August. "It is November!"

From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as
sweet as the spinet's had been, but so much fuller, so much richer,
seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all together. August
ceased to think of the museum; he thought of heaven. "Are we gone to
the Master?" he thought, remembering the words of Hirschvogel.

All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except the
sound of the far-off choral music.

He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and the
music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant
room some of the motives of "Parsival."

Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice
say, close behind him, "So!" An exclamation no doubt, he thought, of
admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.

Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no doubt,
as August thought, this newcomer was examining all the details of the
wondrous fire-tower, "It was well bought; it is exceedingly beautiful!
It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel."

Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass
door, and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within grew
sick with fear.

The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, someone bent down
and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise of its
beauty called aloud, in surprise, "What is this in it? A live child!"

Then August, terrified beyond all self control, and dominated by one
master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell at the
feet of the speaker.

"Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!" he sobbed. "I have
come all the way with Hirschvogel!"

Some gentlemen's hands seized him, not gently by any means, and their
lips angrily muttered in his ear, "Little knave, peace! be quiet! hold
your tongue! It is the king!"

They were about to drag him out of the august atmosphere as if he had
been some venomous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the voice
he had heard speak of the stove said, in kind accents, "Poor little
child! he is very young. Let him go: let him speak to me."

The word of a king is law to his courtiers: so, sorely against their
wish, the angry and astonished chamberlains let August slide out of
their grasp, and he stood there in his little rough sheepskin coat and
his thick, mud-covered boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle,
in the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of, and
in the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes
full of dreams and fire; and the young man said to him:

"My child, how came you here, hidden in this stove? Be not afraid:
tell me the truth. I am the king."

August in an instinct of homage cast his great battered black hat with
the tarnished gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and folded
his little brown hands in supplication. He was too intensely in
earnest to be in any way abashed; he was too lifted out of himself by
his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before any earthly
majesty. He was only so glad--so glad it was the king. Kings were
always kind; so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords.

"Oh, dear king!" he said, with trembling entreaty in his faint little
voice, "Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and
father sold it. And when I saw that it did really go from us, then I
said to myself I would go with it; and I have come all the way inside
it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. And I do pray
you to let me live with it, and I will go out every morning and cut
wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. No one
ever has fed it with fuel but me since I grew big enough, and it loves
me; it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said that it had
been happier with us than if it were in any palace--"

And then his breath failed him, and, as he lifted his little eager,
pale face to the young king's, great tears were falling down his
cheeks.

Now, the king liked all poetic and uncommon things, and there was that
in the child's face which pleased and touched him. He motioned to his
gentlemen to leave the little boy alone.

"What is your name?" he asked him.

"I am August Strehla. My father is Hans Strehla. We live in Hall, in
the Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so long--so long!"

His lips quivered with a broken sob.

"And have you truly travelled inside this stove all the way from
Tyrol?"

"Yes," said August; "no one thought to look inside till you did."

The king laughed; then another view of the matter occurred to him.

"Who bought the stove of your father?" he inquired.

"Traders of Munich," said August, who did not know that he ought not
to have spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little
brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round its one central idea.

"What sum did they pay your father, do you know?" asked the sovereign.

"Two hundred florins," said August, with a great sigh of shame. "It
was so much money, and he is so poor, and there are so many of us."

The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. "Did these dealers of
Munich come with the stove?"

He was answered in the affirmative. He desired them to be sought for
and brought before him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on the
errand, the monarch looked at August with compassion.

"You are very pale, little fellow: when did you eat last?"

"I had some bread and sausage with me; yesterday afternoon I finished
it."

"You would like to eat now?"

"If I might have a little water I would be glad; my throat is very
dry."

The king had water and wine brought for him, and cake also; but
August, though he drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. His mind
was in too great a tumult.

"May I stay with Hirschvogel?--may I stay?" he said with feverish
agitation.

"Wait a little," said the king, and asked, abruptly, "What do you wish
to be when you are a man?"

"A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel was--I mean the master that
made _my_ Hirschvogel."

"I understand," said the king.

Then the two dealers were brought into their sovereign's presence.
They were so terribly alarmed, not being either so innocent or so
ignorant as August was that they were trembling as though they were
being led to the slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished too at
a child having come all the way from Tyrol in the stove, as a
gentleman of the court had just told them this child had done, that
they could not tell what to say or where to look, and presented a very
foolish aspect indeed.

"Did you buy this Nuernberg stove of this little boy's father for two
hundred florins?" the king asked them; and his voice was no longer
soft and kind as it had been when addressing the child, but very
stern.

"Yes, your majesty," murmured the trembling traders.

"And how much did the gentleman who purchased it for me give to you?"

"Two thousand ducats, your majesty," muttered the dealers, frightened
out of their wits, and telling the truth in their fright.

The gentleman was not present: he was a trusted counselor in art
matters of the king's, and often made purchases for him.

The king smiled a little, and said nothing. The gentleman had made out
the price to him as eleven thousand ducats.

"You will give at once to this boy's father the two thousand gold
ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that
you paid him," said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects.
"You are great rogues. Be thankful you are not more greatly punished."

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, and to one of these gave
the mission of making the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their
ill-gotten gains.

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. Two thousand gold
Bavarian ducats for his father! Why, his father would never need to go
any more to the salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats or for
florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the same, and would the king let
him stay with it?--would he?

"Oh, do! oh, please do!" he murmured, joining his little brown
weather-stained hands, and kneeling down before the young monarch, who
himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for the deception so basely
practised for the greedy sake of gain on him by a trusted counsellor
was bitter to him.

He looked down on the child, and as he did so smiled once more.

"Rise up, my little man," he said, in a kind voice; "kneel only to
your God. Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will, you
shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught to be a painter--in
oils or on porcelain as you will--and you must grow up worthily, and
win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when you are
twenty-one years old you have done well and bravely, then I will give
you your Nuernberg stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who
reign after me shall do so. And now go away with this gentleman, and
be not afraid, and you shall light a fire every morning in
Hirschvogel, but you will not need to go out and cut the wood."

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; the courtiers tried to make
August understand that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, but
August could not understand that anyhow; he was too happy. He threw
his two arms about the king's knees, and kissed his feet passionately;
then he lost all sense of where he was, and fainted away from hunger,
and tire, and emotion, and wondrous joy.

As the darkness of his swoon closed in on him, he heard in his fancy
the voice from Hirschvogel saying:

"Let us be worthy our maker!"

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy scholar, and promises to
be a great man. Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, where
the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. In the old house-room
there is a large white porcelain stove of Munich, the king's gift to
Dorothea and 'Gilda.

And August never goes home without going into the great church and
saying his thanks to God, who blessed his strange winter's journey in
the Nuernberg stove. As for his dream in the dealers' room that night,
he will never admit that he did dream it; he still declares that he
saw it all and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And who shall say that
he did not? for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to
see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that
others cannot hear?

X

RAB AND HIS FRIENDS

Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our
arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why.

When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a
crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and
so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before
we got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't
we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like
fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all
reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight.
They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage,
endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a
love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making
gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if
he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would run off
with Bob and me fast enough: it is a natural, and not wicked interest,
that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action.

Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye
at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not, he could
not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting, is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman,
fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her
hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its
heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small thoroughbred,
white bull-terrier, is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog,
unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it;
the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his
pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a
great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the
Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up,
took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat--and he lay gasping and
done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from
Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would
"drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a
chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him
hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the
best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and
many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars
Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged
man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of
_Yarrow's_ tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might.
This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring
shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a
terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged
friend--who went down like a shot.

Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of
snuff!" observed a calm, highly-dressed young buck, with an eye-glass
in his eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and
glaring. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck but with
more urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a
mull which may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and
presented it to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of
snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his
arms--comforting him.

But the Bull Terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips
the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric
phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_, and is off. The boys, with
Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes,
bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our
small men, panting behind.

There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff,
sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in
his pockets: he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland
bull, and has the Shakespearian dewlaps shaking as he goes.

The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our
astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold
himself up, and roar--yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar.
How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled_! The bailies
had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength
and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made
apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient _breechin_.
His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage--a
sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the
darkness, the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole
frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all
round, "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of
anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite.

We soon had a crowd: the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a
cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away
obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense
leather; it ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous
head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise--and the bright
and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp, and dead. A solemn pause:
this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little
fellow over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by
the small of the back like a rat, and broken it.

He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed
him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round
and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John, we'll bury
him after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off after the mastiff. He made
up the Cowgate at a rapid swing; he had forgotten some engagement. He
turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn.

There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen thin, impatient,
black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's head, looking
about angrily for something. "Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick
at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe
with more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk
dismayed under the cart--his ears down, and as much as he had of tail
down too.

What a man this must be--thought I--to whom my tremendous hero turns
tail. The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his
neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always
thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone
were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and
condescended to say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie,"--whereupon the stump
of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were
comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of
the whip were given to Jess; and off went the three.

Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a
tea) in the back-green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with
considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad,
and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector of course.

* * * * *

Six years have passed--a long time for a boy and a dog: Bob Ainslie is
off to the wars; I am a medical student and clerk at Minto House
Hospital.

Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday and we had much pleasant
intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his
huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would
plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that butt of a
tail, and looking up, with his head a little to one side. His master I
occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic
as any Spartan.

One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital when I saw the
large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter
of his. He looked as if taking general possession of the place; like
the Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory
and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and
in it a woman, carefully wrapped up--the carrier leading the horse
anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was
James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John,
this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest--some kind o'
an income we're thinkin'."

By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled
with straw, her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat with its
large white metal buttons over her feet.

I never saw a more unforgettable face--pale, serious, _lonely_,
delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine. She looked
sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her
silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes--eyes such as one
sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also
of the overcoming of it: her eyebrows black and delicate, and her
mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are.

As I have said, I never saw a more beautiful countenance or one more
subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, "this is Maister John,
the young doctor; Rab's freend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you,
doctor." She smiled, and made a movement, but said nothing; and prepared
to come down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had Solomon, in all
his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate he
could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a
gentleman, than did James the Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailie
his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy, weather-beaten, keen,
worldly face to hers--pale, subdued, and beautiful--was something
wonderful. Rab looked on concerned and puzzled, but ready for anything
that might turn up--were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even
me. Ailie and he seemed great friends.

"As I was sayin' she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor;
wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all
four; Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if
cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse, on the same
terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief
round her neck, and without a word, showed me her right breast. I
looked at and examined it carefully--she and James watching me, and
Rab eyeing all three. What could I say? there it was, that had once
been so soft, so shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, so
"full of all blessed conditions,"--hard as a stone, a centre of horrid
pain, making that pale face with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes, and
its sweet resolved mouth, express the full measure of suffering
overcome. Why was that gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable,
condemned by God to bear such a burden?

I got her away to bed. "May Rab and me bide?" said James. "_You_ may;
and Rab, if he will behave himself." "I'se warrant he's do that,
doctor;" and in slank the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen
him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I
have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair
short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set like a
little bull--a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have
been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head;
his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth
or two--being all he had--gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His
head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of
fields of battle all over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as
was Archbishop Leighton's father's; the remaining eye had the power of
two; and above it, and in constant communication with it, was a
tattered rag of an ear, which was forever unfurling itself, like an
old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it
could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long--the
mobility, the instantaneousness of that bud were very funny and
surprising, and its expressive twinklings and winkings, the
intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the
oddest and swiftest.

Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and having fought
his way along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his
own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the
gravity of all great fighters.

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